Thursday

“With the Nokia 8 – we wanted to create the ultimate tool to tell our story”. That’s what HMD told us and we think is a perfect description for this dual-eyed Finn. Any story that stars Carl Zeiss is one we’ll listen to, but let’s start at the beginning.

The Nokia 8 has a 5.3” IPS LCD display on the front with QHD resolution and a blinding 700nits of max brightness. 2.5D Gorilla Glass 5 curves into the phone’s metal shell, which is milled out of 6000 series aluminum. The phone measures 7.9mm at the thickest point and has basic resistance to the elements with an IP54 rating.

The optical engineers at Zeiss helped make the lens for both the rear and the front cameras. The main camera features two 13MP sensors (color + monochrome) with 1.12µm pixels and an f/2.0 aperture. The color camera has optical image stabilization (OIS) and there is Laser autofocus and a dual LED flash to help in the dark.

The selfie camera is one-eyed, but otherwise similar – 13MP sensor (1.12µm pixels) with an f/2.0 aperture and phase detection autofocus. The phone can livestream split-screen footage from the front and back cameras to YouTube and Facebook, something HMD calls Dual-Sight.

HMD partnered with Google to make Google Photos the default gallery app on the phone. You’ll get unlimited photo and video storage in the cloud, to bolster the 64GB built-in memory (there’s a microSD slot if you prefer to keep things offline).

Nokia 8: Tempered Blue • Polished Copper

The Nokia 8 will start selling globally in September at a price of €600, which is steep but par for the course on a flagship smartphone. Pure Android (7.1 at launch) will allow HMD to breeze through major software updates, though the time frame for Android O is still under wraps.